


Just Say Yes

by Mephistophelia



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: Actually not sorry who am I kidding, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Canon Era, Drive-by Andrey-bashing sorry, Established Relationship, Fluff, Have you heard there's a wedding in St. Petersburg, M/M, My boys are precious disasters and should be protected at all costs, Probably 40 percent too much dialogue, this might be the fluffiest thing i've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 03:52:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13068543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mephistophelia/pseuds/Mephistophelia
Summary: "Marriage?" Anatole said—amused, now, at Fedya's inability to catch up. "Me? You? Fedya Dolokhov, best shot in Petersburg, love of my life? I fail to see the confusion."





	1. An Immodest Proposal

**Author's Note:**

> This fic got longer than I meant it to (because I have no self control, and because fluff expands to fill the space available). So it's a two-parter, and the second bit should be up in a couple days probably?

Sunrise spilled freezing light across Fedya's apartment through the uncurtained window. The place wasn’t much. Couldn’t be, not on army pay, which even for a captain was barely enough to make rent. The one room felt crowded with only two pieces of furniture: a sagging double bed and a couch Fedya had found on the street and forced Anatole to help drag upstairs. It was more a place to sleep than to live—although, to be fair, there hadn’t been much sleeping here last night.

Fedya picked up his shirt from the couch and pulled an arm into it. He looked, he knew, something of a disaster. His hair was a wreck, his beard needed trimming, and Anatole’s mouth had left a bruise along his neck the night before, not dark but unmistakable. Still, Fedya could manage. His jacket had a high collar, and the Imperial Army wasn’t known for its interest in personal matters.

Across the room, Anatole sat up in bed. Morning was decidedly not his time of day. Wrapped in the blanket and naked from the waist up, he looked like a Greek god cross-bred with a drowned cat. His hair was matted down, his eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, and he gave no sign he meant to get up at all that day.

“Fedya,” Anatole whined, dragging out the vowels.

“Mm?”

“Come back to bed,” he said, and flopped dramatically back onto the pillow.

Fedya rolled his eyes, though he was more amused than irritated. Being in love with Anatole was like being in love with a small dog. What the prince lacked in maturity and self-restraint, he made up for in enthusiasm.

"I can’t,” Fedya said. “I have to go, _mon chaton._ ”

Anatole spoke French like a Parisian—Fedya spoke French like a drunk Muscovite child with a head cold. But Fedya liked the way the term of endearment sat on his tongue. It felt delicate, like a breath of something not-quite-from-here. Like spun sugar. Like a hymn. Like Anatole.

“You don’t have to go,” Anatole said, as though he could will this into truth.

Fedya pulled his other arm into his shirt, though it hung unbuttoned over his chest. “I promise I do, Tolya.”

Trousers. Where the hell had they got to? The room was ten feet square, how could he lose—

There.

Anatole scowled, as Fedya knelt and fished his now-dusty trousers from beneath the couch. “Where could you go that’s better than staying with me?”

“Some of us have real lives, Anatole,” Fedya said, stepping into his trousers. “With responsibilities. And superior officers who will kill us if we don’t show up when we’re supposed to,” he added a little more pointedly.

"Fuck them,” Anatole said simply. “Come back to bed.”

Fedya looked at Anatole, who still glowed from the night before, sleepy and content, a faint smile on his lips. Anatole, this beautiful man, this enchanting aristocrat, his lover. His lover—Anatole Kuragin was his lover. _His_. The sentence still did not hang right in Fedya’s head. It felt ludicrously improbable. Too good to believe. As if someone told him he’d suddenly been named Tsar.

Fedya had been holding one boot for a good twenty seconds now, without putting it on.

Anatole’s smile broadened.

Anatole thought he was winning.

Anatole, as it happened, was absolutely right.

Fedya groaned, then shrugged off his shirt and set the boot down. Anatole gave a contented hum, more like a cat than ever, as Fedya crawled into bed, pulling the blankets over them.

“Why can’t I say no to you?” Fedya muttered.

“Because,” Anatole said, and kissed Fedya with the brief, self-satisfied air of a man who has won an argument, “I am delightful.”

Fedya laughed and let Anatole wrap one arm around his shoulders. It felt backward somehow, like writing his name with his left hand. Usually he was the one with Anatole curled against him. They’d fallen into that rhythm naturally, without ever speaking about it. Anatole liked it, and Fedya almost couldn’t tolerate anything else. Ceding control frightened him. Anatole dominated him in so many ways already. Fedya was simply carried along, loving Anatole against his will and his reason and his common sense. If he let Anatole lead here too, Fedya feared he would cease to be altogether.

But this morning, giving in felt right. It was comfortable, to be sheltered by Anatole’s body, taller and leaner than his own, solid as the earth.

It felt safe.

"Fedya,” Anatole said. “I want to ask you something.”

This was not a good sign. Anatole beginning a sentence with _I want to ask you something_ could end in a hundred places. Most of them weren’t legal.

“If you’re asking me to write a letter from crazy old Bolkonsky telling Andrey he’s been disowned and has to move to Minsk, I’ve already told you, that’s forgery and I won’t do it.”

“Not that,” Anatole said, with a wave of his free hand. “Anyway, I’ve already done that.”

“Ah, Jesus, Tolya.”

“Andrey deserves it, the little shit.”

“How have you never been arrested?”

Anatole winked. Before meeting Anatole, Fedya hadn’t known real humans actually winked. “Brains, good looks, and charm,” he said. “Now. Come on. You haven’t answered my question.”

“Tolya, you haven’t _asked_ me anything yet.”

This seemed to have slipped Anatole’s attention. He propped himself up on an elbow, then shook a hand through his hair until it reached its usual height. He looked, all of a sudden, serious. Fedya sat up. He did not trust a serious Anatole.

“I love you, Fedya,” Anatole said simply.

Fedya laughed. Jesus Christ. If that was all this was. “I’m going to get court-martialed so you could tell me that? Tolya, I have to—”

He started to climb out of bed again, but Anatole shook his head. Stubborn as anything, and unsettlingly earnest. He took Fedya by the wrist, holding him gently. Fedya could have shaken Anatole off like a fly, if he’d wanted, but the barest hint of that touch and he was helpless.

“No, listen,” Anatole said. “I mean it. More than I’ve ever loved anyone else.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

The biggest lie Fedya had ever told.

Not because he disliked hearing Anatole talk this way—it was still an eternal source of stunned surprise that Anatole was saying things like that to Fedya, _Anatole Kuragin_ was saying them, to all appearances sincerely, and to him. But it was still difficult to believe them.

Because Anatole could have had anyone he wanted. There was no reason for him to want Fedya.

Manipulation, he decided. Simple, self-serving, and expected. Anatole would follow up those sentimental phrases with some horribly illegal thing he’d done that he needed Fedya to bail him out of. Someone he’d blackmailed. Someone he’d gotten pregnant. And Fedya would clean up the mess, like he always did.

Selfishness was easier to believe than sincerity.

“You don’t love me more than you loved Natasha,” Fedya said, and drew back. “Don’t lie.”

Anatole sighed. “Fedya, I’ve told you. That meant nothing. I was a child then.”

"That was _eight months ago_.”

“As I said. I was a child.”

“And you’re telling me you don’t miss it? You fucked half the girls in Moscow, and I know you said you’ve always loved both, women and men, but am I really supposed to think you—”

“Fedya. Shush.”

“Anatole, I’m only saying—”

Anatole sighed. He rolled his eyes, then reached over and pressed two fingers firmly to Fedya’s lips. “I said shush.”

Obediently, Fedya shut up.

God, what was he even saying? How many times had they talked about this? How many times had Fedya’s inability to believe Anatole almost driven them apart? He wanted to sink into the bed and disappear.

“I’m trying to tell you,” Anatole said, and removed his hand. “You’re the only person I want. Ever. So if you’ll let me finish—”

Ever?

“Anatole, what are you—”

"Will you marry me, Fedya?”

Fedya choked on absolutely nothing.

He had gone mad.

He had gone entirely mad.

Fedya had gone completely, utterly, off-the-walls mad, or else the whole rest of the world had.

"Will I what?”

“Marry me,” Anatole repeated, quite calmly.

Fedya stared. His heart began to do a series of acrobatics he hadn’t thought were even possible. “Anatole, I don’t understand.”

“Marriage?” Anatole said—amused, now, at Fedya’s inability to catch up. “Me? You? Fedya Dolokhov, best shot in Petersburg, love of my life? I fail to see the confusion.”

“Anatole,” Fedya said desperately. “Love. I literally cannot do that.”

Anatole shook his head. “Not like that,” he said.

“Like _what,_ then?”

“Everything but that,” Anatole explained. He smiled, taking Fedya’s hand in his. “Marry me every way you can.”

This was madness. It didn’t even make sense. You couldn’t marry somebody without _marrying them._ Binary states. You were either married or you weren’t. But through his confusion, his exasperation, his conviction that Anatole couldn’t be trusted to keep one hand on his own common sense for three minutes at a time, Fedya felt something else.

In that moment, he wanted it.

He wanted to live in the beautiful, simple world Anatole had built for himself. A world in which he could say yes without thinking. But he couldn’t. One of them had to think rationally. To pay attention to consequences. And Anatole certainly couldn’t be counted on to do that.

“Anatole, don’t be stupid. God doesn’t allow that.”

“Then we do it without God,” Anatole said, as though this were as simple as choosing to have one’s tea without milk. “Honestly. When was the last time I was in a church, do you think?”

Fedya paused. Certainly not in the four years he had known Anatole. And he had an agonizingly difficult time imagining it happening before then. Anatole genuflecting beside the pew. Kneeling for prayer. Singing the hymns with the congregation. Taking communion without making some vulgar remark to the altar server about how the Body of Christ wasn’t the only man he’d had in his mouth that morning. The odds of that were…

Well. Not good.

“I expect you were baptized,” Fedya said fairly.

“ _And_ christened, thank you,” Anatole said, “but you follow me. To the devil with God, Fedya, I don’t care and neither do you.”

“And your family?” Fedya said. “You think they won’t ship you out of Russia the moment they find out?”

Anatole cocked his head, considering the possibility. “I wouldn’t miss Russia. It’s cold, it’s dark, and there’s always some bore over your shoulder droning on about the Motherland.”

“Be serious,” Fedya said. “What you’re asking is dangerous.”

Anatole laughed. It seemed powerful, somehow. As if he could fight anyone, defeat anyone, break down the entire world and build a better one from the ground up, with nothing but that laugh. “Dangerous? It’s easy.” He ticked the names off on his fingers to illustrate the point. “Hélène will be thrilled. Ippolyt has never given a damn about anything I do. Mama and I don’t speak, and I plan to pretend Papa’s dead until he actually is.”

He wasn’t wrong, Fedya realized. About any of it.

“And my mother,” he began, softly, but his vehemence was fading.

Anatole beamed, sensing he was gaining ground. “Your mother _adores me_ ,” he said, and tapped the side of his hand against Fedya’s thigh with each word. “Getting me as a son will be the happiest day of her life.”

Fedya scoffed. “Getting you and your modesty,” he said. “For which you are renowned throughout Russia.”

“Yes,” Anatole said primly. “I think there’s a statue to my modesty in Volgograd.”

Fedya was running out of obstacles. He was running out of questions. He was running out of reasons to tell Anatole no. Every one of his common-sense reasons that this was madness, they were so rational, they made so much sense, and Anatole knocked them down one by one, simply, joyfully, like a cat knocking books off a desk for the pleasure of seeing them fall.

He stood up, finally. Anatole stayed where he was, cocooned in the blankets. Watching him with clear blue eyes that did not look hurt, not exactly, but that carried a tiny twitch of anxiety.

“You’re already married, Tolya,” Fedya said, very quietly.

Anatole shook his head. “According to the church,” he said. “Which we’ve already agreed we don’t care about. Fedya, if you think my wife isn’t living in a farmhouse with five children and a strapping, good-looking Pole to warm her bed, you don’t know women.”

Fedya shook his head. He wasn’t disagreeing. He simply had nothing else to say. And the sensation that rose up to fill his emptiness was powerful, and frightening.

He couldn’t allow that sensation to win. Because if it did, God knew what would happen.

Anatole climbed out of bed at last. Lean and graceful, barefoot and bare-chested, more like a statue than a man. He took Fedya’s hands in his, and Fedya let him, feeling the soft warmth of Anatole’s palms—never worked a day in his life, the bastard, but God, that made his hands a pleasure to hold. Fedya felt something building in his throat, bubbling to the surface. He swallowed hard.

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” Anatole said sagely.

“I’m the only one asking the right questions.”

Anatole’s smile didn’t reach both sides of his mouth, but it wasn’t cruel, that half-failure. “You’re asking the boring questions,” he said. “You’re asking what Pierre would ask. What Andrey would ask. You’re many things, Fedya, but you’re never boring.”

He couldn’t be. Loving Anatole, there was no room for _boring._

“Then what should I be asking?” he said.

Anatole pressed closer to Fedya, draping both arms over his shoulders and interlacing his fingers. Fedya shivered, then pulled Anatole closer by the waist, until there was nothing at all between them. He used to resent this, being shorter than Anatole—had said something sarcastic the first time Anatole held him like this, _what do you think I am, Prince, an armrest?_ Now, after so long with Anatole, he never wanted to be held another way.

“Do you love me?” Anatole asked.

Did he love him? Did Fedya love his own heartbeat? He couldn’t live without either.

“What kind of asinine obvious question—”

“Say it, though,” Anatole said, and kissed Fedya on the forehead. “It sounds nice when you say it.”

Fedya melted straight through the floorboards.

“I love you, Anatole. More than anyone in the world.”

Anatole glowed. As if, somehow, he’d thought Fedya could say anything else. When he’d bewitched Fedya from the first day they met, and had wound Fedya tighter in his spell every day since, until now Fedya was tangled in a web of golden threads whispering _Anatole_ , _Anatole,_ and he no longer even wanted to escape.

“And do you want to marry me?” Anatole asked.

“Of course I want to,” Fedya said.

The words struck his chest like a drumbeat. It was the truest sentence he’d ever spoken.

“Well, then,” Anatole said.

Fedya kissed Anatole on the cheek, softly, to get him to pay attention, to make him _see._ “Anatole, we can’t,” he said. “We have to live in this world like everyone else. We don’t get to choose.”

Anatole blinked, as though Fedya had lapsed into Chinese. “Why not? I do.”

Fedya felt the snarl of frustration rising before he could stop it. Yes, of course Anatole got to choose. He did that every day. Woke up and decided which facts he would accept. Constructed a beautiful world of lies and omission and things he simply would not think about. He’d always been able to do that. Fedya had never picked up the knack. Reality was simply too real to do anything but bow your head and take it.

But Anatole was still watching him, and the question was still ringing through Fedya’s head, louder than the bells in St. Basil’s, over and over, _Will you marry me, We could be married, Fedya I love you, Fedya will you marry me?_

“I can’t,” Fedya said, and thought for a minute he might cry.

Anatole’s eyes softened, and with a quiet noise, he held Fedya closer. Fedya rested his head against Anatole’s shoulder, the perfect, thrilling sensation of Anatole’s body against his cheek. Its own reality, in its way.

“Why not?” Anatole said. He held Fedya’s head on his shoulder now, reassuring, barely breathing. Fedya could feel his pulse, standing this close. Fast, anxious. Anatole was terrified, Fedya realized. He’d asked the question, but he hadn’t been sure Fedya would even want to say yes. And he’d asked anyway. Because—

“Because I, I…”

Why not indeed.

He wanted to say yes. He wanted this. He wanted Anatole. And if he said no, what was he giving up this happiness for? A respectable life he’d never asked for, to please respectable people he didn’t like, to honor a God who didn’t interest him and a church who wanted him dead. It was risky, yes, and stupid, but Fedya Dolokhov had built a career out of risk and stupidity, and there was no reason to give them up now.

And when he took a step back and saw Anatole’s face, those wide innocent eyes, the face of the man he’d loved for years and who, now, somehow, impossibly, loved him back—

When he looked at Anatole, he knew.

“Yes,” he said.

Anatole’s mask of composure shattered against the floor. His mouth opened slightly, as if to speak, but only breath came out. When he spoke, it was a single word, disbelieving, longing to believe.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” Fedya said. He was rambling now, the words boiling over, he couldn’t stop them and wouldn’t have wanted to even if he could. “I’ve never loved anybody but you. Not like this. I love you more than anything, and this is dangerous and I can hardly believe you even want me at all but yes, I’ll marry you, yes, you idiot, Anatole, yes—”

Anatole, thankfully, shut Fedya up with a kiss.

No one in Russia kissed as well as Anatole did.

No one in the world, living or dead or yet to live, would ever kiss as well as Anatole did.

Fedya wanted to hold this man forever. To keep him close, so close their bodies blended and they became one person, one breath, one mind, one pulse, the same.

“Well, fiancé,” Anatole murmured, his voice low against Fedya’s cheek. “Now you’ve done it. You’re stuck with me.”

The truth of it struck Fedya all at once. If not for Anatole’s arms around him, his knees would have buckled with the shock.

“God help me,” Fedya said. “This idiot is going to be my husband.”

That word. Husband. _His._

Fedya embraced Anatole, a wild and almost childlike hug around the waist, nearly knocking him to the ground. Anatole yelped, surprised by the sudden almost-tackle, before laughing as Fedya pulled him back into bed and kissed him, with joy and urgency that turned Fedya’s mind to starlight.

It felt like their first kiss, years before, in the library at Helene and Pierre’s. When Anatole had flirted so openly with Fedya across a dinner party that Fedya believed his friend must be half-mad, until Anatole left the room during the third course and brushed against Fedya’s shoulder on the way out, murmuring _upstairs, third door on the left_ with a wink—and it became quite clear that if Anatole was half-mad, Fedya was entirely out of his mind. Fedya had ducked out two minutes later, and another minute after that he was locking the library door behind him and pressing Anatole’s back against the bookcase, unbuttoning his shirt with fingers that couldn’t move fast enough for his mind, lips and breath tangled endlessly, then kissing the flash of skin at Anatole’s collar while the spines of Pierre’s books looked on. To this day, he couldn’t see the name _Thomas Aquinas_ without thinking of Anatole, face flushed, eyes closed and head thrown back, almost purring beneath Fedya’s touch. They’d missed the rest of the party, stumbling downstairs disheveled hours later. Anatole walked Fedya to the door, through the empty house, and kissed him goodnight on the stairs, a hand still brazenly tucked in the back pocket of Fedya’s trousers.

Fedya felt the same hunger this morning as he’d felt that night. The same urgency, the same sense that the whole world might be watching, but let them watch.

But today was different. Today was the beginning of everything.

Anatole guided Fedya’s lips up from his shoulder, where they had gotten distracted, and brought them to his own. “It feels good, doesn’t it,” he said. “Like a fairy tale.”

“ _Beauty and the Beast_ ,” Fedya said. “Spoiled, selfish prince falls in love and finally learns how to care about other people.”

Anatole wrinkled his nose. “That wasn’t the one I had in mind.”

Fedya laughed and kissed the scowl off his fiancé’s lips.


	2. Everyone Raise a Glass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to the lovely people who left kudos or comments on the first chapter! You give me life, as always.
> 
> Also, Hélène is weirdly channeling Persephone from Hadestown in this half, which wasn't what I originally had in mind, but I'm not mad.
> 
> All right, part 2 of 2—which, if possible, is even more sentimental than part 1 of 2.

When they told Fedya’s mother, over dinner at her house, their attempt to break the news smoothly was a colossal failure. Fedya shifted his glance, fidgeted, stuttered, stopped and started and stopped again, until Anatole sighed heavily, took his hand and then took over, as if nothing could be simpler. _Madame Dolokhova, your son and I are engaged._

After the initial shock, she was delighted—just as Anatole had said. She hugged Fedya, saying something not entirely reassuring like _I always knew._ Then she shook Anatole by the hand and told him with almost-frightening severity to take care of Fedya, to treat him well, not to do anything he’d regret. Fedya saw Anatole’s smile waver and hid his own laugh in a cough. They debated it on the walk home, whether she’d meant it as a threat. Given the way Madame Dolokhova had expertly dismembered an entire chicken with a meat cleaver in under two minutes, Anatole stubbornly maintained that she’d murder him if he so much as sneezed in Fedya’s direction.

It wasn’t impossible, Fedya consented.

For Anatole, breaking the news in person wasn’t possible. Hélène was in Moscow, Ippolyt in Paris, and though his parents lived on the far side of Petersburg he had no intention of telling them. Instead, he wrote a letter to each of his siblings with Fedya’s help, using faintly obscure language to allow for misinterpretation if the Tsar’s bureaucrats happened to read it. Ippolyt wrote back eventually, so late it almost seemed irrelevant. His lukewarm congratulations, however, felt more bored than disapproving.

Three days after the letters went off, there was a knock on Fedya’s door. They opened it to find Hélène herself standing on the doorstep, hair wild, out of breath, fresh off the train from Moscow.

“It’s _about time,_ ” she said, not wasting her breath on _hello_.

Anatole laughed, then wrapped an arm around Fedya’s waist, as if showing off a prize. “You’re invited to the wedding, of course,” he said. “Friends, otherwise. Not exactly a family affair.”

“Wedding?” Hélène repeated. She nudged Anatole out of the way with her hip, pushing into the apartment. “Toto, tell me you aren’t stupid enough to have a wedding.”

Fedya raised his eyebrows in agreement. “Your brother has never met a bad idea he didn’t love.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Anatole said, almost pouting. “It’s _romantic._ Which you’d know if you had a romantic bone in your body, you military-minded caveman.”

Fedya rolled his eyes and kissed Anatole, accepting defeat. The thrill of abandoning secrecy made the kiss that much sweeter. He was kissing Anatole _in front of people_ , in front of Hélène. Other people knew. They had nothing to hide. “All right,” he consented. “It’s romantic, you pea-brained showoff.”

Hélène shook her head, though she was smiling. “You’re perfect,” she said. “Assuming you don’t kill each other within a year.”

Fedya laughed. “Hélène, if we haven’t done that by _now._ ”

#

Two weeks later, Anatole and Fedya sat together in the study of Anatole’s flat, a private, comfortable suite of rooms in a middle-class neighborhood of Petersburg. The books in that elegant room were almost certainly decorative—at least, Anatole never read them. He sat writing at the desk; Fedya stretched out on the sofa in front of the bookcase, flipping through a history of Hannibal’s military campaigns.

After a moment, Anatole sighed and pushed both hands backward through his hair. He spun around in the chair, hands still behind his head, looking at Fedya with plaintive, shameless desperation. Inkstains crawled up his wrists, spotting the cuffs of his shirt.

“Fedya,” he began.

“I’m not doing it,” Fedya said without looking up.

“But you’re so much better at this than—”

“Anatole, I’m not writing your vows for you.”

“But—”

“ _No._ ”

Anatole groaned, then swiveled back around, snatching up his pen.

“ _Fine,_ ” he snapped.

Fedya smirked and turned the page.

#

Say what you would about the Kuragins, Fedya thought, but they knew how to throw a party.

They held the wedding in Moscow, out from under the noses of Anatole’s parents. Not that he meant to hide anything, Anatole explained, he wasn’t ashamed, but it was easier to explain to his parents what they’d already done, rather than give them a chance to stop it. Fedya, listening to Anatole’s too-fast excuses, had held him until he stopped rambling, deepening his breathing to help Anatole match the rhythm, while the nerves passed. Anatole was anxious by nature—more so under pressure. But Fedya had always been able to ground him, better than anyone ever could, even Hélène. And besides, he didn’t care if Vasily and Aline Kuragin ever found out.

Fedya was going to marry Anatole. To hell with the rest.

Arriving at Matreshka’s that night, Fedya felt like he’d stumbled headfirst into a kaleidoscope. The part-tavern, part-whorehouse whirled with people, bright colors and a crush of voices, and the giddy rainfall of vodka from glass to glass. The swirl of bodies swept him up: their friends, his and Anatole’s. The Romani crowd they drank with, a few of high society’s more open-minded libertines, three dancers from the Moscow ballet—two women and a man, all of whom Anatole had almost certainly slept with. Balaga, holding a bottle of vodka instead of a glass, for efficiency’s sake. A handful of soldiers, Fedya saw with surprise. From across the room, Denisov caught his eye, then tapped the side of his nose as if to say _I always thought so, Captain._ Fedya blushed and snatched a glass from a passing woman, then drained the whole thing in one.

But embarrassment faded quickly, replaced by a low-burning thrill.

These were his friends.

This was his wedding, and Anatole was—

“There you are,” Hélène said, extricating herself from the crowd. On the scale of formality, her gown fell somewhere between a night at the opera and a night at the tavern. Though her eyes were shining, Fedya didn’t think she’d had much to drink. “Come here, brother.”

_Brother._

Fedya glowed.

She led him to the back of the tavern, the room’s attention following both of them. But Fedya had no interest to spare for anyone else. Because there, leaning against the same table where they’d drunk and cursed and gambled and fought and loved, was Anatole. And looking at him now, Fedya had nothing to say, nothing to think.

It made no sense, how a man like Anatole could love a soldier like Fedya. His legs in those narrow black trousers stretching on until the end of the world. Lean and elegant in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat Fedya recognized, black and striped vertically with gold—the one he’d worn the first night they met, the sentimental romantic in him couldn’t help it. Fedya himself had worn his infantry uniform. It fit well, he felt at home in it, and if he was going to disgrace God and country, he might as well do it properly. From the way Anatole looked at him, this seemed to have been a good choice.

“You clean up well,” Anatole said.

Fedya grinned. “Don’t get used to it. Come tomorrow I’ll be my usual self, dripping mud all over your floors.”

Anatole pulled Fedya closer by the lapels, edging their hips together. Fedya's breath hitched at the faint pressure of Anatole's thigh between his legs.

“That’s all right," Anatole murmured. "You know I like you filthy.”

“Boys,” Hélène said from over Fedya’s shoulder. “Better wait ‘til you’re married.”

There wasn’t long to wait. Hélène whistled, loud enough to pierce the tumult, and brought the room to silence at once. The three of them—Anatole, Fedya, and Hélène—clambered onto the table, using it as a sort of makeshift dais. She led the ceremony, as qualified as anyone else for a service with no church and no God. Based loosely on Christian liturgy, Hélène’s text veered left and right when needed, drawing cheers from the crowd, packed with a healthy spice of cursing— _if there’s anyone here who has a reason these two goddamned fools shouldn’t be wed, speak now, or don’t come crying to me about it later_.

Until she turned to Fedya, then to Anatole, then said to the assembled crowd, “Now, like the romantic idiots they are, the grooms have written their own vows. Dolokhov?”

Fuck. Of course Fedya had to go first.

Fedya had written this all down, had them on a scrap of paper in his pocket. He’d always been that way—trust in words, in writing, when you could trust in nothing else. But as he stood there, he didn’t need to read. He could see everything he’d meant to say there in Anatole’s eyes. Watching him. Smiling. Welcoming him home, as they always had, as they always would.

He took a breath and trusted.

“Tolya, I wish I could say I loved you at first sight,” Fedya said. “But I didn’t. The first night I met you, you lost me two hundred rubles in two hands of Boston, and I just about punched you in your stupid face.”

Anatole laughed, enjoying the secret only they knew—that in fact it had been three hundred rubles, and in one hand.

“It took me months until I understood,” Fedya said. “It was new, to me, all of this. I’d loved people before, I thought, but never like this. Every thought I had was about you, all the best days of my life had you in them, every dream I cared about had you by my side. It scared me, loving you so much. But I’m not scared anymore.”

He stood up straighter, holding both Anatole’s hands in his, and smiled.

“Anatole Kuragin, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You and your lack of common sense, your three-minute attention span, your perfect hair and your pretentious French accent. You’re sunlight, Anatole, you’re warmth, you’re air, and I love you more than any of that. And I am _proud,_ love, to be your husband. So raise a glass”—he added, turning to the room, who did, in a single oceanic wave of crystal and vodka—“to happiness, freedom, and the best stupid decision I’ve ever made in my life.”

The room echoed with the toast, warm and sincere and out of sync, as Anatole pulled Fedya in for a kiss that lasted a full minute.

It wasn’t everything Fedya wanted to say. But they had a lifetime to get to the rest.

At last, they disentangled themselves from one another, and Fedya looked at Anatole with a small smirk. “Now that I’ve made a fool of myself,” he said, “it’s your turn.”

Anatole closed his eyes. “My turn,” he repeated, sounding faintly ill.

“Come on, Kuragin!” came a voice from the back of the crowd—Balaga, perhaps, it had the right cadence. The room rang with laughter, and even Anatole managed a smile through his nerves.

“All right,” he said.

He nodded toward Hélène, who ducked down, reaching for something.

“Fedya,” Anatole said, “I love you. And I am terrible with words. As you know.”

Fedya blinked. Jesus Christ on high, if he thought he could get away without saying more than that…

“So,” Anatole said, “I’m not going to use any.”

He bent down and took what Hélène offered him—a violin, Fedya realized.

And in that moment, Fedya knew he was going to cry in front of a tavern-full of people, and there was nothing in heaven or on earth that could stop it.

Anatole looked at him for a moment. The look of a man who couldn’t believe his own luck, and half-believed it would all disappear with the sunrise. Then Anatole tucked the violin beneath his chin, and he began to play.

Fedya had heard Anatole play countless times. Been at dinner parties where Anatole had been coerced into performing a Mozart sonata because a young society-girl with no sense of rhythm wanted to mangle the piano part. Seen him leap onto this very table in this very tavern and join Steshka to lead the crowd in a Romani drinking song. But he had never heard Anatole play like this. Every note spoke a hundred words, a thousand. All of them saying _Dolokhov, Fyodor Dolokhov, Fedya._ All of them saying _I love you._

He didn’t know much about music. Had always left the theory to Anatole, couldn’t have told Bach from Schubert if his life depended on it. But he knew—without doubt, without hesitation—that Anatole had written this. It sounded like his voice. It sounded like his laughter. It sounded like the pattern of his thought, the rise and fall of his breath.

And then, the melody shifted, and it sounded like Fedya.

With a jolt to his heart, he heard his own cadence in the music. A sort of counterpoint, grounding the weaker, flightier line that came before. The lower line was steady, audacious but reliable, darting out in its own directions but always returning to where it needed to be. Never dropping the rhythm, never losing time.

If that was how Anatole saw Fedya, it finally made sense, his love.

The music was beautiful. Fedya could see that now.

And then somehow Anatole was playing both lines at the same time, it should have been impossible, one man with a human number of fingers shouldn’t have been able to do it, and yet they fit together perfectly, one interwoven with the other, one taking precedence and then bowing out to the second but never dominating, never erasing, and always, always keeping time.

When Anatole let the final note ring out, he barely had time to say “I love you” once more before Fedya almost tackled him to the ground and kissed him, not caring who saw the tears in his eyes.

Fedya knew Anatole wasn’t perfect. He was a reckless libertine with no thought for rules. He drank too much, managed money badly, struggled to think fifteen minutes into the future. He was the worst gambler Fedya had ever seen and tormented his brother-in-law like it was a sport, and though he would happily talk about himself for three hours without pause, he was almost temperamentally incapable of telling Fedya when something was wrong, of being serious.

Fedya knew he wasn’t perfect either. He was a cold fighter who had never learned to check his fierceness at the door. He dreamed of the war still, relied on irony to push others away, drank even more than Anatole did, though he held his liquor worse. He didn’t consider himself handsome, or charming, or entertaining, or particularly intelligent. And no matter how long they embraced, no matter how many times Anatole told him otherwise, Fedya had always found himself struggling to believe this would last, that he was loved, or worth loving.

But they didn’t have to be perfect. They just had to _be_. There in the swirling mass of a Moscow tavern, shimmering with color and vodka and laughter, in one another’s arms, together.

Anatole wasn’t perfect. But Anatole was freedom. Was possibility. Was Fedya’s.

And Fedya—

There must have been something in Fedya worth loving, if Anatole loved him like this.

“So,” Hélène said drily, as the kiss entered its third minute and Anatole’s hands began to wander, eliciting a chorus of whistles and cat-calls from the crowd. “I assume you take each other to be your unlawfully wedded husband.”

They looked up as if they’d forgotten she existed, Anatole wrist-deep in Fedya’s trousers.

“I do,” they said in unison.

Hélène grinned—her line was _you may kiss the groom,_ but given the circumstances, she shrugged.

“Well, carry on,” she said.

They did.


End file.
